Katie’s office hours:Katie is often available for talk and concerns right after each class; her regular office hours are on Wednesdays at either 2:30-4 pm or at 4-6 pm. The SignIn Sheet tells you which it is this week. There is a calendar outside Katie's door that says so too. And you can see which it is on Katie's website, under NEWS! On the last Wednesday of the month Katie tries to have extended office hours from 2:30 to 5:30.

Katie’s social hours:these are on Wednesdays at either 2:30-4 pm, or at 4-6 pm, alternately with office hours. These too are noted on the calendar outside Katie's door as well as on Katie's website, under NEWS! On the last Tuesday of the month Katie shifts social hours to that day, from 5-7 pm. What are social hours? a time to drop by to talk to Katie and whoever else shows up, other students, both undergrad and grad, occasionally faculty and staff, or even folks in the area.

Conversations with Irene: these are also on Wednesdays, from 11-12. Irene Xue (email: ixue@terpmail.umd.edu ) is the teaching assistant for our class, who is offering her own drop in times for students to talk about feminisms, science fiction, second life, or anything else that comes up in class that you hope to learn more about, or just share more about. FLYER

Design Fiction

“How do you entangle design, science, fact and fiction in order to create this practice called ‘design fiction’ that, hopefully, provides different, undisciplined ways of envisioning new kinds of environments, artifacts and practices.... Design Fiction is making things that tell stories. It’s like science-fiction in that the stories bring into focus certain matters-of-concern, such as how life is lived, questioning how technology is used and its implications, speculating bout the course of events; all of the unique abilities of science-fiction to incite imagination-filling conversations about alternative futures. ...It’s meant to encourage truly undisciplined approaches to making and circulating culture by ignoring disciplines that have invested so much in erecting boundaries between pragmatics and imagination.” (Bleecker 2009)

About Me

I am Professor of Women's Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park, and a Fellow of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH). My Ph.D. is from the History of Consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz, with interdisciplinary scholarship located at a juncture of feminist technoscience studies, intersectional digital cultures and media studies, and LGBT Studies. I have published two books, Theory in its Feminist Travels: Conversations in U.S. women's movements (Indiana, 1994) and Networked Reenactments: Stories transdisciplinary knowledges tell (Duke, 2011) and am now working on
Attaching, for Climate Change: a sympoiesis of media, and Demonstrations and Experiments: Quaker women at the origins of modern Science.